Slow Recoil (9 page)

“Can you share your work with me?” he said.

She went to the bedroom and returned with a single file folder. It was letter-sized, blue, and bore no writing or identifying features. She placed it on the table in front of him. He opened and began to read. The first page contained the photos of the two targets, their names typed beneath:

BOJAN KORDIC

GORAN MITOVIC

Then followed several pages of tiny notations—dates and times and tracked movements of the targets. Their home address, their work address, phone numbers, the names of their spouses and children and the schools they attended, their lives reduced to a series of comings and goings. She had done good work. The information was concise, invaluable in ensuring the two main criteria were met: that these were in fact the bona fide targets; and that it would be possible within the scheduling and routine of their lives to make contact and retreat with limited collateral damage or liability to the cause.

“Well done,” he said, and set folder aside.

“I have worked hard,” she said, “getting to know the people at work. The woman who works outside the manager's office, this Bojan Kordic. His executive assistant. She keeps his schedule. We share a cigarette outside during break.”

“There will be time to talk of our plans,” he said. “It has been what, three years?”

“Almost,” she said.

“You look good. Healthy. This country agrees with you,” he said.

She caught his eyes, and he held her there, and she knew what he was looking for. Some sign that she had forsaken their plans. The first thing The Colonel had instructed in bringing them together for this: the greatest threat is not death, for we all died a long time ago. No, the greatest threat is that those of you who are sent abroad will succumb to the liberties and luxuries of your new country. Shopping malls and fast food drive-through restaurants, and women and men who lay down with anyone at all after a single dance in a night club. There will be those of you who forget in time why you are there in the first place…

“What do you think of this country so far?” she asked.

“It is new,” he said. “Like it just opened.”

And they shared their experiences. The first landing. Pearson International Airport. The language. The faces from around the world moving freely on the streets. Everything open and free. And new, so new, as he had said. Some things were better, yes, but many things were not. He thought of telling her about the money he had won, but he kept it to himself.

He excused himself and went to the bathroom. When he came back, he said, “Will you miss this place?”

He watched her.

“Some things,” she said. “I suppose, yes.”

And then it happened, just like that, just as he was sitting there. Like a narcoleptic zoning in mid-sentence, Kad forgot where he was. Blinked. Somewhere else, the damp and moldy basement of a house in the hills, the shells walking in yard by yard, the artillerymen of the enemy forces well-trained in this after the first days of war in Croatia. They walked them in, they drew lines, and they created walls of exploding shells.

“Getting closer,” he said. “Listen.”

“What is getting closer?” Donia asked. She looked at him.

Kadro flinched, as though he had heard a noise that was inaudible to her. It frightened her. He stared at nothing at all for the longest moment, then, as though a hypnotist had snapped his fingers, turned and looked at her. And he blinked.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Good. Yes.”

He finished his tea and thought something stronger would ease the strangeness that had fallen between them. She had cried in his arms all those years ago. In that kitchen where The Colonel's man had brought them together, the sun coming through the window and catching the dust in the air, the little kitchen warm from their bodies, warm from their collective hatred and grief. He had not had a drink in more than two years. He knew men back home, men he had fought with in the fields and the hills, good men who were drunks now, drug addicts. Needles and pills. They did not work, they could not work. Men in their late twenties and early thirties who drank vodka and brandy and cheap strong beer, hoping the next drink would be the drink to numb them just enough, to ward off the memory of the things they had done. It was not an easy thing to live with nightmares when you knew they were real.

“What is his name,” Kad said.

She looked up. Caught in the headlights. The accusation.

“This man. This man you have become friends with. Please. Don't lie to me.”

“There is no one. I have…I have a friend, that is all he is. He is…”

He closed his eyes. He was not unprepared for this. And so he thought: rather than her, I can erase the trace of this man. A small grace, it would be his little secret. That there could be no compromise of their work, this was the inarguable fact. That he could perhaps spare her for this indiscretion, he would try.

“Who is he? Where does he live?”

“There is nobody, please. I am alone. Look around. You can see the life I have lived here. Alone. I've worked in the places where I was told to work, I have watched the men I was told to watch. When they drink their coffee, where they buy their lunch, when they go pee… ”

She stared at him, unblinking. He considered this and finished his tea and rubbed his hands together. He leaned forward, his eyes shining with that electric intensity she remembered now from their early days, the days of the kitchen table, and it was a look that both comforted and terrified her. She understood that with this man, there was no comprehension of the notion of defeat.

“Do you remember what it was like back then? Do you remember? I remember. I remember what it was like to be gone from my village, to be gone for months that seemed like years, to have been gone so long that I became an animal. Yes, capable of things that only an animal could be capable of. But righteous. In our cause, in the blood we shed. And I remember what it was like that July to come home to find the bastards had rounded up the men—our brothers and fathers and husbands and cousins and grandfathers and uncles—and they had lined them up and shot them…”

“I remember,” she said. And she was steel now, or ice. She stared, and she said, “Don't tell me what I remember or don't remember. My husband. I remember my husband. Who he was and where he came from, what he stood for. A good man. But I can't remember his face sometimes. At night, when I wake up with the dreams of the bombs and the guns. I search, and there is nothing. I can't remember his face… ”

She did not cry, for the reservoir was long emptied. This, this was something she had shared with the school teacher. The burden of the survivor.

“Tell me,” he said, and reached into his jean pockets. “If these belong to your new Canadian lover.”

He held a single key attached to a plain metal key ring.

“From my purse,” she said. “What right—”

“You are moving,” Kad said, and stood, slipping the key back in his pocket.

“When?”

“Tonight. Your tracks here are compromised. We are moving you immediately.”

Their words turned into an argument. It was the stress of the days behind them and the days that lay ahead. The high emotion of their shared past. After the neighbours called to complain, and the super stopped by to check in, Kad left her there to pack her clothing. She could bring one bag only. Men would arrive after dark, he explained, to wipe the unit clean so there would be no trace of her life in this small apartment.

“I will pick you up at midnight,” he said.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Remember,” he said. “Remember why we are here.”

It was the next afternoon when Kad returned to the apartment to take one last look for anything they might have missed. To ensure the movers Turner had brought in had not somehow forgotten anything—for you could not trust anyone these days to complete a mission simply as assigned. He was in the apartment unit when this man entered. Looking for her, for Donia. Calling her name. A friend of a friend. Oh yes, you have a new friend—
a boyfriend
?

So then. She had made her mistake, and now he had made his. He had to see the place with his own eyes to know the job had been done. And by chance, sheer circumstance, he had been there when this man had come looking for her. Their work not yet begun, and already the operation was compromised. After running from the apartment, Kad sat thinking in the car outside a convenience store. He took the roll of golden dollar coins from his pocket and held them in his right hand. The knuckles were already swelling, chafed. He wrapped his fingers about the roll of coins and squeezed. A line of blood leaked where a thin sheaf of his flesh was torn from his knuckle. The man he'd struck, it had been a good hard shot. But he should have finished the job. Instead he'd run. What a fool. Forgive me, my people.

He opened the door and walked into the store. He set the roll of coins down on the counter. The clerk had long hair and hadn't shaved in a few days. Kad wanted to slap the sleepy look from the young man's face. Such disrespect. Running a shop with his shirt stained, untucked.

“Scratching tickets,” Kad said.

“Huh?” the clerk said.

Kad made a scratching motion with his thumb and forefinger. “Scratching tickets,” he repeated.

“Which one?” the clerk said. “There's like nine different kinds, man.”

Kad shrugged. “One of each,” he said.

FIVE

M
cKelvey was perched on a stool at Garrity's, squinting at his raccoon eyes in the dark mirror behind the bar, a good golden pint of Steam Whistle working with the pain killers to produce a new brand of unfailing optimism. It was something one could just never take for granted, this peace that settled in marrow-deep. Yes, if the feeling had a colour, it would be the blurry soft yellow of squinting through a summer's day. The draft beer was cold, and it was brewed just down the street in the old roundhouse where the trains had converged and merged for a century. McKelvey was now officially marked absent from his pain, and it was a good thing. His nose was swollen to almost double its size across the width of the bridge, the pouches beneath his eyes turning the hue of eggplant. A series of blood vessels had apparently imploded in his right eye, resulting in a grotesque black cherry splatter across the whiteness of the orb. He wondered about the employment of some utility beyond bare knuckles.

“I've been punched in the face before,” he told Huff Keegan, “but not like this. No, sir. This guy knew how to throw a goddamned punch. That, or it was brass knuckles.”

“They say Gordie Howe had one of the hardest punches in the game,” Huff said.

“You knocked out a few teeth in your day.”

Huff shrugged, and it was like a ripple moving along a mountain range. Two hundred and thirty pounds of corded muscle rolling in a tectonic shift. But the last two years away from the game had taken its toll, and Huff 's body was less toned and more bulky now, his stomach starting to show early signs of the eventual paunch that he would pat while telling stories of his gladiator days to his grandchildren.

“One night you're the guy doing the feeding, the next night you're the guy getting fed,” Huff said. “It all evens out in the end. I had my nose broken three times, lost four teeth. I had my orbital bone fractured, right here under my right eye. Broke my left hand twice. Two of the knuckles on my right hand are fused together from hitting helmets. I scored six goals a year on average, and most of those were flukes. Two thousand penalty minutes.”

He held his hands up in front of his face, turning them over, thick bricks of permanently swollen and scarred flesh and bone. They seemed a marvel to him, that they should still work after the way he had treated them.

“Spent a lot of hours after games with my hands in a bucket of ice,” he continued. “Sitting there while the pretty boys and the scoring leaders were out having beers or grabbing a steak—or grabbing a piece of something else. It was the job, you know. It was just the job.”

Huff had played a few games up in the big leagues with Buffalo and Detroit, just enough, McKelvey supposed, to give a man a taste of what he was missing. Down in the minors of the American Hockey League, in the dead-end steel towns and the factory towns of the north and northeast, Huff Keegan had been an icon who'd carried his own duffel bag, slept four to a room, and grown old by his late twenties.

“Miss it?” McKelvey said.

Huff shrugged, and said, “Shit yeah. Every day, man.” After a beat, he said, “You miss the job?”

McKelvey smiled and said, “Every second day.”

He drank his beer and thought of the unexpected visit to the emergency department that morning. The twelve-year-old doctor confirmed what he already knew, that his nose was broken. It was not set off kilter, so it required no setting—the good news of the day. He was taped across the bridge and handed a scrip for yet more pain killers, McKelvey pretending he had never before listened to the spiel about the seriousness of the drug, the constipation and stomach cramps, the responsibility that came with that piece of chicken-scrawled paper. Now his mind was already playing through the next steps here. The partial plate number, the basic description of the vehicle and the man—the fridge magnet in his pocket. He ran through his call to Tim Fielding from the payphone in the emergency waiting area.